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Strike while the iron is hot, they say, but what happens when the iron just won’t cool down? Do you just keep striking forever?

In a month, it will have been four years since July Talk released its eponymous debut album. That’s a veritable eternity in modern pop-music terms, yet the Toronto quintet has faced a rather fortunate quandary during that long period between releases: go in and record new music or keep taking the old music to the people in all the different territories that kept signing on to re-release the first album?

The opportunities just kept coming for 2012’s July Talk so — as co-vocalist Leah Fay puts it — July Talk wound up “striking and striking with the same iron, for awhile.”

“I think we were ready to try again before anyone else was,” concurs singer/guitarist Peter Dreimanis. “We just kept having opportunities to re-release the album in different markets and, obviously, if you do that you have to go tour it and introduce yourself.

“We started writing in January 2013 and kept being taken away from it. But I feel super-grateful that it happened because I don’t think we were ready — we were definitely ready to start it, but I don’t think we were ready to finish it.”

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In the end, although it ran the risk of losing some forward momentum at home in Canada, the band found a way to quietly duck around the dreaded “sophomore slump.”

July Talk wound up putting out three extra versions of the first album, each of which demanded some extra material, so when it came time to write the followup to July Talk, an entire second album’s worth of material had already been generated.

As a result, says Dreimanis, “it felt like we’d already grown together and we already knew in which direction we were headed.”

Rather than wearing out the band’s welcome, four years of near-constant gigging at home and abroad only served to shore up July Talk’s reputation as a ferocious, theatrical live act. It was given high-profile slots at both the Field Trip and WayHome festivals this past summer alone, and will return to Toronto after much touring through the fall with a pair of dates at the Danforth Music Hall on Oct. 28 and 29.

The group’s new album, Touch, released last Friday through Sleepless Records at home, major label Island Def Jam in the States and various other labels overseas, is a far more rough-’n’-tumble affair than its spiffed-up predecessor, the confident product of “picturing ourselves onstage in our most ideal settings, the best shows we’d ever played.”

“Live is definitely the playground of the project,” says Dreimanis. “It just allows us to experiment and there’s no real right or wrong answers. I think, if anything, the only pressure about it is the pressure to kind of push the envelope and give them a show every night, so sometimes that ends up with us, like, spitting in each other’s mouths and doing s--- that feels a little bit shock-driven.

“But I think we’ve realized that once you write songs that really lend themselves to that live atmosphere, the ‘shockiness’ can kind of be balanced out. The songs are doing the work for you and bringing that chaos, y’know?”

“In the end we just kind of rolled through a lot of material, never saying no,” adds bassist Josh Warburton. “We kind of treated it like improv. We never said no to a song or a direction and just cultivated a bunch of material, and about three-quarters of the way through the process we locked into what the vibe was, where we wanted to land.”

Much of the onstage chaos during July Talk shows stems from the interplay between frontpersons Dreimanis and Fay, and the vocal back-and-forth — or “Push + Pull,” as Touch’s thwacking lead single accurately describes it — between his gruff grumble and her coquettish soprano now feels much more natural and unforced than it did on the first record.

Dreimanis and Fay also resisted the urge to treat their songs as he-said/she-said conversations (“I’m being ‘masculine,’ I’m being ‘feminine,’” quips Fay) this time around, addressing their audience rather than each other through 10 stylistically diverse songs themed around the idea of human contact.

“On the first record we kind of fell back into this boring trope of the duet,” says Dreimanis. “But the way Leah is live is very much on this record, which on the first record it wasn’t.”

“Because we’d only played, like, 10 shows when we recorded it, I was just kind of performing this version of what I thought the only way to be a frontwoman would be while surrounded by testosterone and screaming guitars,” says Fay. “I was going to a lot of drag shows at that time and was very inspired by the masculine take on femininity and gender in general, so I kind of felt like I was playing a drag version of myself.”

It is somewhat vindicating to July Talk to have learned that its major selling point is having two distinct singers; the very factor that insiders in the music business warned the band would turn people off from the beginning.

“We live in a culture of ‘experts’ to begin with and there’s no shortage of experts in the music industry,” says Warburton. “And the reality with our band is what makes us work are the things that an expert within the music industry points to as being a problem: angular arrangements, confusion between two voices.

“I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about it openly, but I do remember this moment where we were so exhausted from all these considerations that were being put upon us that it just kind of came down to: ‘Is this cool? Is this terrible?’

“We have this really good content-control system. It has to go through five filters. If one person in our band doesn’t like something, we’re not playing it,” he says. “And that’s the only thing we can do.”

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